Babel in my mindNaoki Fuku's oeuvre is a critical approach to the controversy of the human existence. It questions the social and political situation of the individual in its original cultural environment. It is all about existence and ways of coping with it or getting around it. The series “Babel in my Mind” plays with the concept of identity. On the one hand it makes identification difficult if not altogether impossible and on the other hand it manages to give a striking picture of a complex inner world.One could look upon people's identity as a multitude of layers. Knowing all the layers, however, does not necessarily mean to really grasp the identity behind them. The artist is playing with these layers he is putting them on top of each other in a constant process of hiding them. Human being's identity can be explained as a multitude of layers but also as a conglomerate of characteristics. Hiding those characteristics means taking off facets and showing another existence. The works seem to be variations of one and the same man showing a multitude of personalities and characteristics. Thus this variety helps the viewer to see traits of the person behind them. It culminates in a game about how much the artist has changed what the viewer is looking at. The artist is playing with the viewer’s perception and expectation while showing a remarkable array of identities.Fuku creates new identities and shows the inner life of the resulting characters while playing with the layers which are quasi wrapped around it to represent inner horrors and convulsions in a very expressionistic way.The artist’s combination of texts and images lines up with a variety of well-known examples from contemporary art and art history. The way he fills his characters’ heads with texts, though, evokes the story of the Tower of Babel according to which God disapproved of the attitude of the people who tried to reach for the sky in order to make a name for themselves and even attempt to equal him. He punished them for their arrogance by confounding their speech and scattering them all over the world.This so-called confusion of tongues also takes place in the minds of Fuku’s characters. Rudimentary pencil lines enclose a jumble of inked texts in different languages which reveal the deepest inner self of the artist. He thinks in Japanese, English, German and Russian. Those languages represent important stations in his very international career. At first glance the sketches seem to be simple and elementary, but when the viewer’s eyes embark on the combination of image and text he becomes aware of the profound content of the works.(Patricia Meyer 2015, May)